Saturday, September 22, 2018

Apologies for the radio silence of late - I'm out of the country at the moment. But you know me, I'm a slave to my responsibilities, so here (albeit a couple of days late) is your all-important YouGov subsample update.

Just to recap on the significance of this: before the Alex Salmond story broke, YouGov's Scottish subsamples had shown a long unbroken sequence of the SNP in the high 30s or low 40s. The first post-Salmond subsample put the SNP on 34%, which might have been a meaningless blip, or might have been a sign that the SNP had suffered some genuine damage. But this is the second YouGov subsample since then, and both have put the SNP back in their 'normal range'. That would obviously be consistent with the 34% being meaningless margin of error 'noise', or indeed a temporary slump that has since been reversed. We should find out more soon, because another YouGov poll has been newly released today - but the datasets haven't been published yet, so we still await the Scottish subsample figures from that one.

(Although individual subsamples should not be regarded as reliable, YouGov's Scottish subsamples are of more interest because they appear to be separately structured and weighted - hence the relative stability of the figures.)

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I haven't been keeping a close eye on the news since I left, but I did vaguely notice the other day that one or two of the usual suspects on the radical left were piling in with the official BBC line that "Nicola Sturgeon wants to avoid a referendum", and were using as proof her call for Brexit to be delayed. Unless I'm missing something (and maybe I am), that theory makes very little sense. Nicola Sturgeon calling for something does not mean it will happen, and if a no deal Brexit occurs next March in spite of the SNP's best efforts, the casus belli for an early independence referendum will simply be even more watertight.

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I was shocked to learn today that Derek Bateman had been ill, but what an amazing story about his partner donating an organ to him. All the best to him for a full recovery.